The Canadian shift in Montreal

Abstract

Based on an impressionistic study of 16 young Canadians, mostly from Ontario, Clarke, Elms, and Youssef (1995) reported that the short front vowels of Canadian English are involved in a chain shift, the "Canadian Shift," triggered by the merger of 0Á0 and 0O:0 in low-back position, whereby 0ae0 is retracted to low-central position, and 0E0 and 0I0 are lowered toward the low-front space vacated by 0ae0. This article extends the study of the Canadian Shift to the English-speaking community of Montreal, Quebec, using acoustic rather than impressionistic analysis and a larger and more diverse sample. The new data motivate a revised view of the Shift, at least as it operates in Montreal, in which the three front vowels are retracted in a set of parallel shifts, rather than rotating in a chain shift. In 1991, Labov demonstrated that the major dialects of North American English could be categorized in three groups, based on two phonological criteria. These involved the organization of the low-front and low-back corners of the vowel space. One criterion was the split of 0ae0 into tense and lax phonemes (tense 0ae:0 in past vs. lax 0ae0 in pat). The other was the merger of 0Á0 (cot) and 0O:0 (caught) as a single, low-back phoneme (the "low-back merger"). Labov further showed that these criteria were the structural basis for chain shifts affecting whole subsystems of vowels in the dialects of two of the groups, giving each a distinctive sound. These chain shifts-the Northern Cities Shift, affecting the Inland Northern region of the United States, and the Southern Shift, affecting the Southern United States-have been widely reported and discussed since their initial exposition in Labov, Yaeger, and Steiner (1972). Labov grouped most of the remaining varieties of North American English-those spoken in New England, Western Pennsylvania, the Western United States, and Canada-into a "Third Dialect." The basis for this geographically discontinuous group was that all of its members feature single phonemes in both corners of the low vowel space. In the low-front space they have a single 0ae0 phoneme with purely phonetic tensing and raising An earlier version of this paper was presented at NWAVE 32 (University of Pennsylvania, October 10, 2003). Thanks are due to members of the audience at that presentation, as well as to anonymous reviewers of the present version of the article, for helpful comments. In the preparation of the present version, the author is especially indebted to Anicka Fast and Erika Lawrance for research assistance and to Myrtis Fossey for assistance with statistical analysis. This research received financial support from three sources: the

Vowel change across three age groups of speakers in three regional varieties of American English

“…Whether listeners are sensitive to these cross-generational variations will be determined in our future work. Although it is still premature to speculate what motivates this new development in the regional vowel systems of American English, it is informative to point out that similar developments involving these vowels have been reported in other English-speaking countries including the Canadian shift in parts of Canada (e.g., Boberg, 2005; Clarke et al, 1995) and a shift in southeastern England (Torgersen & Kerswill, 2004; Trudgill, 2004). However, these studies report only positional vowel changes and we lack information about possible variation in formant dynamics.…”

The Canadian Shift: Its Acoustic Trajectory and Consequences for Vowel Categorization

“…One implication of this finding could be that since Boberg's (2005) study of Montreal, the change has progressed in real time, with its trajectory evolving (Figure 3). The eldest speaker in his sample was born in 1919, and the youngest in 1981; the birth years of my older group range from 1937 to 1961, while my younger group ranges from 1984 to 1995.…”

“…An analysis of interspeaker variation shows a significant degree of ordered heterogeneity, with young women leading the change and older males retaining the most conservative pronunciations, the typical progression for a sound change advancing in a community below the level of consciousness (Eckert 1989;Labov 1990). But in contrast to what Boberg (2005) found, it seems as though the operation of the CS in Montreal now involves the retraction of /ae/ without any accompanying lowering, while /ɛ/ is simultaneously backing and lowering in the vowel space.…”

Religion as a Sociolinguistic Variable

“…For example, in the early Montreal French Study (Sankoff and Sankoff ; Thibault and Vincent ), all the Francophones sampled are local, L1 French‐speaking Catholics, religion and heritage could later be inserted to permit the corpus to be merged with a larger multi‐group corpus which includes, say, the local anglophone speakers. Subsequent studies, like those of Boberg (, ), would then be able to share an enlarged database, which includes the earlier Montreal studies. To choose another American example, most studies of US Hispanic communities assume that all speakers are Catholic, but recent studies like the Pew Research Center's () or Münch's (forthcoming) demonstrate that this is no longer the case.…”